Cover: Jerry Boyajian notes that the title of the book may be
an allusion to the 1960 British film The League of Gentlemen, based
on a 1958 novel of the same name by John Boland. The movie is about

a group of ex-military men forced into retirement who plan
and carry out a bank robbery. One amusing piece of happy coincidence (or
is it?) is that two of the characters in the movie's League are named Hyde
and Mycroft.

John O'Neil notes a possible connection in the title
of the book to the rock group The League of Gentlemen. Mags Halliday sees
the title as an allusion to the League which helped Percy Blakeney, the
Scarlet Pimpernel, in Baroness Orczy's book of the same name.

Peter Briggs suggests that "The artwork style
seems, to me, to be vaguely reminiscent of the long-defunct Illustrated
London News."

Page 1. Panel 1. Dover is the point in England
which is closest to France; it is famous for its white cliffs, which can
be seen in the background.

Panel 2. The figure on the cigarette case is Harlequin. To quote
from Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia:

In the British pantomime, a sprite supposed to be invisible to all
eyes but those of his faithful Columbine. His office is to dance through
the world and frustrate all the knavish tricks of the Clown, who is supposed
to be in love with Columbine.

This may be symbolic of the cigarette case's owner's view of himself, as
a kind of trickster who frustrates the "knavish tricks" of his enemies.

Apologies to the individual (whose name I've lost) who suggested, when
this issue came out, that the Harlequin here was a Aubrey Beardsley illustration;
I doubted you, and I was wrong. The source of the Harlequin is Beardsley's
"The Scarlet Pastorale," which was published in 1898 in The London Year
Book. Mikael did us a big favor and found an
online image of "The Scarlet Pastorale."

Panel 3. As Bill Jennings points out, the image of the hansom
cab is linked with A. Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories; its appearance
here is likely not coincidental, for reasons which will soon become apparent.

Panel 5. "John Bull" is the name of the unofficial icon of England,
in much the same way that "Uncle Sam" is the nickname of the unofficial
icon of America. You can see images of the pair of them at this very
nice Library of Congress exhibit site. (Thanks to Fred Hadley for spurring
my correction here.) Peter Briggs notes that "Bryant
and May have produced matches...oooh, for ages!"

Panel 7. Our introduction to two characters who will be central
to this series. The gentleman is "Campion Bond." This has the ring of the
familiar to me, but as best I (or anyone else) has been able to come up
with, it's a wholly original name. It could simply be, of course, that
Moore came up with a familiar-sounding name which has not literary basis.
Kate Paice, among many (many) others, pointed out that Campion Bond
shares a name with Margery Allingham's detective character Albert Campion.
I myself don't see much resemblance between the two characters beyond the
name. Kate also mentions that a "campion" is "a small wayside flower...like
a scarlet pimpernel." Mags Halliday mentions that the floral meaning of
the campion has some relevance, given that it is a flower like the scarlet
pimpernel and the possible derivation of the "League" from the Pimpernel's
League.

Pedro Gutiérrez Recacha points out that
in this sequence

Bond takes his cigarette case from his
jacket, takes a cigarette and fires it; we can't see the character's face
till the end of the sequence - is very similar to the sequence of the film
"Doctor No" (Terence Young, UK, 1962) in which the James Bond character
is introduced -Connery takes a cigarette and fires it while playing at
the casino. It's not until the girl he's playing against asks his name
when the camera shows his face saying his famous sentence "Bond, James
Bond"

and speculates that this is proof of Campion's relation
to James Bond.

Jerry Boyajian reports that a recent Wizard article confirmed
that there is no prior literary source for Campion Bond, and that

Moore has said that he needed a character to play that particular role
in the story, but there was none available who fit the bill, so he made
one up. He created that name specifically to give a sense of familiarity
to the character where none otherwise existed.

The lady is "Wilhelmina Murray," but as we will eventually learn, this
is not the name by which many of us will recognise her.

Page 2. This is our first indication that what
we are seeing is the England of an alternate reality. The massive structure
that Bond and Murray stand upon is (as can be seen from the plaque) the
"Channel Causeway," that is, a bridge across the English Channel, which
would link England and France. Although such a bridge, like the idea of
a tunnel under the Channel, has been proposed for many years (Henry Spencer
notes that the idea was first proposed in 1802, to Napoleon), nothing like
this was ever built, not just for the obvious political reasons but also
for technological ones; the machinery needed to construct a bridge of this
size, like the cranes seen here, was not available, certainly not in 1898.
We might surmise that the reason for such the difference in this world
is that personalities from Victorian-era fiction, such as Sherlock Holmes,
might have made a difference in the course of events, and so put England
much farther ahead than it otherwise was. So this series might properly
be called "steampunk," for that genre of fiction, including Paul Di Filippo's
"Steampunk" trilogy, Ronald Clark's Queen Victoria's Bomb, and Bruce
Sterling & William Gibson's The Difference Engine, in which
science fictional events take place against the backdrop of the 19th
Century, usually late 19th Century London. (Nancy A. Collins
points out that K.W. Jeter's Morlock Night and
Infernal Machine
predates DiFilippo's and Gibson's work) Emilio Martin
prompts me to add Tim Powers' novel The Anubis Gates to the list
of steampunk novels.

Stuart Nathan says, of the Channel Causeway:

Moore isn't the first Brit author
to mention this. in Michael Moorcock's Hawkmoon novels (particularly the
first tetralogy, "The Runestaff") there is a 'Silver Bridge' across the
Channel, linking England, or as it's called here the Dark Empire of Granbretan,
with Europe — most of which it has conquered. Moorcock is, like Moore,
a heavily-bearded science fiction author who has consumed more drugs than
is feasible.

The one-and-a-half-armed statue of the woman on the bridge is of Britannia,
who is a personification of the British Empire. The first known instance
of the use of this figure to represent Britain was on a Roman coin, circa
150 AD; the figure was revived in 1665, during the reign of Charles II.

The lion appears on the arms of England in passant gardant, that is,
walking and showing the full face, as it does here.

"Albion reach," seen on the stand below the lion, is a sort of double
pun, I think. "Albion" is an ancient, poetical name for England, most likely
deriving from the Latin "albus," (white) and from the white cliffs of Dover.
So "Albion reach" puns not only on "all beyond reach"--that is, England
being beyond the reach of the world--but also on "reach" in the meaning
of "England's grasp"--that is, England, by linking itself via the bridge
with France, has France, and perhaps the world, within its grasp.

Stuart Nathan adds:

In your note on 'Albion Reach', you
don't mention the literal - non-punning - meaning. A reach is a stretch
of water visible between bends in a river or channel. It's quite natural
that a bridge connecting England to the continent would be sited at Albion
Reach.

Note the pun on the crane's side.

Paul O'Brien points out that the announcement of the delay in the completion
date of the Causeway is a reference to "the infamously behind-schedule"
construction of the Channel Tunnel.

Page 3. Panel 1. I'm afraid I'm going to
have to spoil the identity of "Wilhelmina Murray" at this point, so if
it's surprises you are after, read no further.

"Wilhelmina Murray" is in fact Mina Harker, of Bram Stoker's
Dracula.
"Murray," in the novel, was Mina Harker's maiden name, and "Mina" is short
for Wilhelmina. In Dracula Mina Harker was the wife of Jonathan
Harker, the putative protagonist for the novel; they, along with Dr. van
Helsing, came into conflict with the vampire, and eventually triumphed,
although not before Mina was bitten by Dracula and forced to drink his
blood. At the end of the novel, however, she was again human, and with
Jonathan and their son seemed to be a family. Clearly something happened
between then (1897) and the current time to cause Mina to divorce Jonathan.

Panel 3. It may be that Bond's "ravished by a foreigner" is a
reference to Mina's being bitten by Dracula, although knowing Moore's work
it's something more intricate.

Page 4. Panel 1. Campion Bond's words here
imply that he works for the British Secret Service. It may be that Moore
is implying that Campion Bond is a familial predecessor to James Bond -
a grandfather or great-grandfather, perhaps?

Mycroft Holmes, in the world of A. Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, is
the older, fatter, and more intelligent brother of Sherlock Holmes; it
was established in the Holmes stories that, just as Sherlock had occasion
to render Her Majesty certain services, so too did Mycroft, but on a more
regular basis. In "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans," Holmes
and Watson have this exchange:

"It recalls nothing to my mind. But that Mycroft should break out in
this erratic fashion! A planet might as well leave its orbit. By the way,
do you know what Mycroft is?"

I had some vague recollection of an explanation at the time of the Adventure
of the Greek Interpreter.

"You told me that he had some small office under the British government."

Holmes chuckled.

"I did not know you quite so well in those days. One has to be discreet
when one talks of high matters of state. You are right in thinking that
he is under the British government. You would also be right in a sense
if you said that occasionally he is the British government."

"My dear Holmes!"

"I thought I might surprise you. Mycroft draws four hundred and fifty
pounds a year, remains a subordinate, has no ambitions of any kind, will
receive neither honour nor title, but remains the most indispensable man
in the country."

"But how?"

"Well, his position is unique. He has made it for himself. There has
never been anything like it before, nor will be again. He has the tidiest
and most orderly brain, with the greatest capacity for storing facts, of
any man living. The same great powers which I have turned to the detection
of crime he has used for this particular business. The conclusions of every
department are passed to him, and he is the central exchange, the clearing-house,
which makes out the balance. All other men are specialists, but his specialism
is omniscience. We will suppose that a minister needs information as to
a point which involves the Navy, India, Canada and the bimetallic question;
he could get his separate advices from various departments upon each, but
only Mycroft can focus them all, and say offhand how each factor would
affect the other. They began by using him as a short-cut, a convenience;
now he has made himself an essential. In that great brain of his everything
is pigeon-holed and can be handed out in an instant. Again and again his
word has decided the national policy. He lives in it. He thinks of nothing
else save when, as an intellectual exercise, he unbends if I call upon
him and ask him to advise me on one of my little problems."

Bala Menon astutely points out the propriety of "a Bond in the Secret Service
working for an M." And Christopher L. Tumber points out the James
Bond Chronology and notes that the chronology specifically credits
Mycroft Holmes with being the first "M." Kiralee Macauley points out that
Christopher Marlowe, according to some sources, is reputed to have been
the head of Queen Elizabeth's secret service, and that he was referred
to as "M," making him the first "M." Marc comments
that this is not so, that Marlowe may only have been an agent of the Crown,
and not even that, and that Sir Francis Walsingham was the head of the
secret service and of Elizabeth's Privy Council, not Marlowe. Peter Briggs
adds that

At the turn of last century (around 1900),
in the Naval Department offices at Whitehall (that time part of the Foreign
Office) was a man called Robert Cummins. When British Intelligence
was formed separately, he was made first head of it, and liked to be known
by the initial of "C". Afterwards, it became a tradition to call
the head of this department by their initial, hence "M" in Bond, which
itself has actually passed into usage!

I should add that I've read, in at least one history
of the British Secret Service, that the single initial tradition predates
the Victorian era and goes back to Elizabeth's time.

Panel 3. "We live in troubled times, where fretful dreams settle
upon the Empire's brow." It is interesting that Bond says this, in light
of the fact that 1897, the previous year, was Queen Victoria's Diamond
Jubilee, an event of great, even overwe'ening, self-celebration on the
part of the British.

But the truth is that despite the boasting and hubris of the Diamond
Jubilee, the general mood among British leaders and opinion-makers was
pessimistic. France was re-emerging as a world power and expansionist European
rival, newly-united nations like Germany and Italy were disturbing the
familiar world order, British exports were falling, and the supremacy of
the British manufacturing and commercial empire was being threatened by
Germany and the United States.

As well, as Owen Erasmus points out, in 1898 Britain was run by the
Conservative Party, who whipped up fears as a way to maintain power. Which
are a few of the reasons that someone like Campion Bond would be worried
about the future, even in an alternate Earth like this.

Page 5. Panel 2. We're in an opium den;
those long instruments the men are holding are opium pipes.

Thanks to Daniel Nogly, I can now provide an Arabic translation of the
following pages.

Guide: "Who's staying here, Miss?"

Panel 3: Guide: "Whom are you you seeking here?"

Murray: "Thank you for your great help."

Page 6. Panel 2. Ms. Murray is speaking
to Allan Quatermain, the hero of H. Rider Haggard's Quatermain books, the
most famous of which is King Solomon's Mines. Quatermain was one
of the prototypical square-jawed Great White Adventurers, journeying among
native races in lost worlds on Earth. Allan Quatermain had an enormous
amount of influence on pulp/genre literature afterwards; everyone from
Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter to DC's/Ken Fitch's/Bernard Bailey's
Tex Thompson to DC's/Whitney Ellsworth's/George Papp's Congo Bill to Indiana
Jones can trace their lineage to Allan Quatermain.

Obviously his fate here, as an opium addict, is a new twist on the character,
who was killed at the end of Allan Quatermain, in 1887. (His supposed
death is referred to in Chapter 1 of "Allan and the Sundered Veil," in
the back of this issue)

James Hudnall points out a website for those interested in finding out
more about Allan Quatermain & H. Rider Haggard. It's a Haggard
bibliography written by the author Jessica Amanda Salmonson, of the
whizzo-keen Violet Books.

It might be supposed that Moore is at least indirectly influenced or
inspired in part by the Wold Newton genealogy created by Philip José
Farmer in Tarzan Alive! and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life.
The theory was that a meteor landed near Wold Newton, in Yorkshire in the
18th century, and irradiated a number of pregnant women, thus producing
a family of extraordinary individuals, including everyone from Tarzan to
Doc Savage to Sherlock Holmes to Harry Flashman to Travis McGee. For more
information on the Wold Newton universe, check out The
Wold Newton Universe web site. (R. Winninger notes that Moore directly
refers to Tarzan Alive! in his preface to the collected edition
of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns.)

Panel 11. Mina: "Get off!" Guide: "Come here, woman! We are not
that ugly. That's just a glass [1]. You won't feel a thing."

Panel 12. Fat Guy: "Come on...be nice to us."

Page 7. Panel 1. Slim Guy: "You are going
to like this. We are his darlings [favourites]."

Panel 9. Martin Linck, a gentleman and
scholar of much learning, contributes the following:

This panel depicts Quatermain's revolver,
in detail, as he discharges it into one of Miss Murray's assailants.
This panel attracted my notice because the revolver appears to be of a
very unusual type. First, we can see that, unlike a modern revolver, and,
indeed, unlike most revolvers being produced in 1898, this revolver has
nipples portruding from the back end of each chamber on the cylinder. The
presence of these nipples indicates that it is a black-powder weapon, requiring
each chamber to be manually loaded with powder and ball. Once each chamber
is loaded, a mercury-fulminate impact cap is placed over each nipple, the
idea being that the hammer will strike the cap, send a spark through the
nipple into the chamber, and detonate the round. Next, I feel I must point
out that this weapon appears to have NINE chambers: One nipple is under
the hammer, as the weapon fires, and I count four more on the side of the
cylinder facing the reader. The other side of the cylinder must display
a similar number. Very few revolvers have nine chambers; the more usual
designs (such as the Colt Single-action Army or the Smith and Wesson Schofield)
all boast six. Finally, this revolver appears to have two barrels: look
closely at the illustration, and you may perceive that the cylindrical
structure beneath the barrel proper is, in fact, another bareel, of a diameter
equal to that of the first.

You may be wondering where I'm going with this.
I shall keep you in suspense no longer: I must conclude, on the basis of
these observations, that the revolver is a LeMat's, a very famous, rare
and unusual weapon dating from the American Civil War. The LeMat's was,
arguably, the highest incarnation of the concept of the black-power revolver.
As I've pointed out, it had nine chambers, each containing a ball
of .36 caliber, allowing the marksman 50% more shots between reloadings
than his opponent. .36 caliber rounds are less effective than the .45 caliber
rounds of Army Colt black-powder revolvers, but are on a par with the Civil-War-Era
Navy Colts (the venerable Model 1851) However, this was not the main selling
point of the LeMat's. The second, lower barrel pointed out previously is,
in fact, a 12-gauge shotgun barrel. In dire extremity, or at will, the
owner of the pistol could flip a lever on the side of the frame of
the weapon, which would cause the impact of the hammer to fall, not on
one of the chambers in the cylinder, but on the primer of the shotgun,
discharging a hail of lead or shrapnel at his foe.

What does this choice of weapon say about Allan
Quatermain? Not having read any of the novels about this character, I cannot
say whether the LeMat's occurs anywhere in them. If it does occur, its
presence here is easily explained...If Moore includes it here by his own
prerogative, the problem becomes knottier. The weapon is archaic, even
in 1898, since black-powder weapons became more or less obsolete in the
1870's, with the introduction of cased ammunition...I can only speculate
that Moore might have included it here because it is a weapon that has
an undeniable style. Not for Moore, the mass-produced and cliched Remington
or Webley; no, he insists that the weapons his characters carry, like the
characters themselves, be charming artifacts of the Victorian era; out-of-place
in any modern context, but the paragon of man's ingenuity in their own
time. I should add that I recently had a chance to inspect a LeMat's during
a visit to Tombstone, Arizona, and that it differed in some small details
from the weapon depicted here. I attribute these small differences to artistic
license, however, and consider them of no consequence.

Paul Andinach adds that

In KSM, Quatermain helpfully provides
a list of all the guns packed for the expedition [available on request];
in AQ, he is less helpful, but it's possible to get an idea of what they
are packing from various references. Neither book mentions the LeMat; Quatermain's
revolver of choice appears to be a Colt.

Peter Briggs wonders if Quatermain got the LeMat
from John Carter, in "Allan and the Sundered Veil" (see below).

[1] What the "glass" comment might be is unclear; Daniel Nogly's
translator said that it meant specifically a "wine glass."

[2] I'm assuming that "he's a destroyer" is a phrase for an opium
addict.

Page 10. The submarine seen here is, of course,
the Nautilus, the craft of Captain Nemo, of Jules Verne's Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under The Sea and its sorta-sequel The Mysterious
Island.

Jules Verne is commonly credited as the creator, with H.G. Wells, of
modern science fiction. The Captain Nemo of the Disney film, the Nemo played
by James Mason, is not the Nemo of the Verne novels. Verne wrote somber
novels, full of gloom and marvelous (to late 19th century eyes)
science, with a charming, romantic misanthrope in Nemo, someone quite a
distance from Mason's Nemo.

Peter Briggs says that "that elegant symbol between
the Nautilus' gallery "eyes" looks like a gussied-up question mark
to me..." The question mark, as we'll see, becomes a leitmotif for
this series.

Kelly Tindal says that "I notice that O'Neill's
version of the Nautilus does not appear to have the three-sided
spike on the nose that allowed it to sink so many ships and carve up the
cunning cachalots...is it retractible? It seems to be an important
point, as it is one of the only parts of the Nautilus that is described
in detail." Kelly follows up by asking,

Since O'Neill's version of the Nautilus
is clearly an original design, one must assume that the Nautilus
did not have the tentacles upon it until further into its adventures...did
Nemo add them after the battle with the squid pod in "Leagues" as a sort
of honor to a vanquished foe (one which almost cost him his life)?
I ask because tentacles such as O'Neill's would certainly have aided Nemo
in escaping the underwater cave beneath Lincoln Island.

Cory Panshin says, of the Nautilus, "Since
I don't recall Verne describing the Nautilus as squid-like (but only as
a sea-monster), I can't help wondering if this depiction of it is a Lovecraft
reference."

Page 11. Panel 3. This is Captain Nemo.
The Verne character is, as Moore shows here, an Indian prince, a Sikh,
driven to misanthropy by British injustice; he is not someone who looks
like James Mason. The specific event that drove to Nemo to become a pirate
was the brutal suppression by the British of the Indians during their 1857-1858
uprising, an event that left a deep mark on the Victorian psyche, and an
even deeper one on the Indian's; it was full of brutality and atrocities
on both sides, and strengthened British conservatism on the subcontinent.

In The Mysterious Island, Nemo's origin is described in this
way:

Captain Nemo was an Indian, Prince Dakkar, the son of a rajah of the
then independent territory of Bundelkund [1] and a nephew of the
Indian hero, Tippu-Sahib [2]. His father sent him to Europe when
he was ten years old in order that he receive a complete education with
the secret intention that he would fight one day with equal arms against
those whom he considered to be the oppressors of his country.

In 1857, the great Sepoy revolt [3] erupted. Prince Dakkar was
its soul. He organized the immense upheaval. He put his talents and his
riches to the service of this cause. He sacrificed himself. He fought in
the front lines, he risked his life like the humblest of those heros who
had risen up to free their country; he was wounded ten times in twenty
encounters but could not find death when the last soldiers of the fight
for independence fell under English bullets.

[1] Bundelkund, aka Bundelkhand, is in the eastern section of the
Central India Agency, and is now a part of Madhya Pradesh, in the north
central part of India. It was not ‘transferred' to British control until
1817, which would make Nemo in his 70s or 80s at the time of League,
if he was sent away from the independent territory at age 10.

[2] "Tippu-Sahib" was, presumably, Tipu Sultan (1753-1799), the
son of Haidar Ali. Haidar Ali (1721-1782) took the throne of Mysore in
1761, warred on the British, and eventually forced them to sign a treaty
of mutual assistance, in 1767. Haidar Ali, with French help, attacked the
British in the Carnatic in 1780, but was killed in 1782. Tipu Sultan carried
on the battle in the Second Anglo-Mysore War, but stopped when French aid
was withdrawn, in 1784. In 1790 Tipu attacked the city of Travancore, starting
the Third Anglo-Mysore War, but was defeated in 1792. In 1799 Tipu, deep
in correspondence & negotiation with the French, refused to cooperate
with the British Governor General in his efforts to suppress French influence
in India. The British sent two armies into Mysore and drove Tippu into
Seringapatam, his capital, and took it by storm; Tipu died, bravely fighting
in a breach in the walls.

Fred Ferro adds that Tipu Sultan, the "Tiger of Karnataka,"

applauded the principles of the American Independence and the French
Revolution and was an Aufklaerer, a man of the Enlightenment. He was Muslim
but tolerated Hinduism and even worshipped in the Temple of the goddess
Sri-Ranga...he was allegedly the first man in history to use rockets for
war...

Terence Chua notes that

apparently owned a magificent mechanical tiger which he used as a torture
device to kill his enemies. A fictionalised account of the seige of Seringapatam,
and more about the Tippoo Sultan himself, can be found in Bernard Cornwall's
Sharpe's
Tiger.

[3] The "great Sepoy revolt," aka "The Great Mutiny," was the culmination
of much Indian dissatisfaction with British rule. The "sepoys" were the
Asian troops in the armies of the East India Company, which were, for all
intents and purposes, the British military power in India (there were relatively
few regular British army units present in India before this). The sepoys
in the Company armies outnumbered the British by around 7:1, but were (of
course) commanded by a British officer corps, most of whom were incompetent
and/or venal and/or cruel, and there was a great deal of unrest in the
armies. The Minié rifle cartridge was introduced at this time; it
had to be bitten for loading, and a rumor spread among the disaffected
elements of the army that the grease used in the cartridge included the
fat of cows and pigs. This rumor - which later investigations showed had
some truth to it - was immensely offensive to both Hindus, for whom the
cow was a sacred creature, and to Muslims, to whom the pig is an unclean
animal. When 85 sepoys in Meerut refused to accept the new cartridges,
they were disgraced and imprisoned; an Indian regiment released them and
killed as many Europeans as they could, prompting massacres and counter-massacres.

That shell on the front of Nemo's turban is, of course, a nautilus.

"Memesahib" is a Hindi word, used by Hindus and Muslims in colonial
India when addressing or speaking to a European woman of social or official
status; "sahib" is the word used when addressing a male.

Chris Davies points out that this is "both the first time he's been
depicted as ‘Indian' in dress, and that (aside from that) he winds up resembling
Nemo's portrayal in ‘Fushigi no Umi no Nadia' fairly closely."
Fushigi
No Umi No Nadia, aka Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, is an
animé set at the same time period as League, and is about
a circus girl named Nadia, and is roughly based on Twenty Thousand Leagues.

R. Winninger, among others, points out that Nemo was sixty during the
events of Mysterious Island, which would make him considerably older
during League #1, and that Moore & O'Neill have taken some artistic
license with Nemo's appearance here, Nemo not being nearly so distinctively
Indian in dress in the Verne novels.

William Stoddard, among others, took issue with
the idea that Nemo could be both Hindu and Sikh. However, Moore himself
has stated flatly that Nemo is a Sikh, so the conclusion to be drawn, I
think, is that Nemo is ethnically a Sikh and a Hindu by faith. Santosh
Menon adds the following:

Actually it is kind of possible for Nemo
to be a hindu and a sikh. Hindu families in punjab sometimes initiated
the eldest son into the sikh faith; sihkism being a martial religion in
some sense and sikhs being the defenders of the faith and the land - more
or less.

There is one unlikely "fact" here though - Prince
Dakkar/Nemo as Tipu Sultan's nephew ie the sikh nemo is the muslim Tipu's
nephew.

Santosh added, in a later e-mail:

Good news ;) - it is actually possible
for Nemo to be Tipu's nephew. In fact it is quite easily explained. There
are several parallels of muslim/moghul monarchs marrying the daughters
of Rajput/Hindu Kings in Indian history. And possibly vice-versa. The most
famous example is that of Akbar the Great - he married the the daughter
of the Rajput king of Amber, Rajasthan. Many of these were intended to
achieve alliances between the kingdoms sometimes in the face a a percieved
common enemy (some of these were love affairs and have inspired painful
hindi films). So the british would have presented acommon enemy here. QED. (Caveat - in our universe
this is a bit unlikely; bundelkhand is in Central/North india and Tipu's
sphere of operations was entirely in the peninsula.)

As for the hindu-sikh part - martial sikhism is
popularly believed to have evolved from hinduism in response to invasions
(mostly muslim) from the middle east and central asia. It is not all that
unusual to find sikhs worshipping in hindu temples and vice-versa. There
lot's of revisionism and grenade lobbing over the origins and history of
sihkism so i'll leave it at that.

All of the preceding said, those, like me, who
have no problem with Nemo being shown as so overtly Indian in League
must admit that he was given no particular ethnicity in Twenty Thousand
Leagues Under the Sea, and that it was only in The Mysterious Island
that his ethnicity, along with his background, were revealed. Jean-Marc
Lofficier was kind enough to provide me with a scan of the original illustration
by Alphonse de Neuville of Captain Nemo, which you can see here.

The
white man, on the right, is Nemo. A (very) rough translation of the text
which accompanies his first appearance reads:

The second unknown man deserves a
more detailed description. A disciple of Gratiolet or Engel could read
his open physiognomy. I immediately recognised his dominating qualites:
his confidence, for he held his head nobly on an arc fromed by the line
of his shoulders, and his black eyes looked at me with a cold assurance;
his calm, for his skin, pale rather than colored, exhibited the quietness
of his blood; his energy, which was seen in the quick contraction of his
muscles; and finally his courage, for his great respiration implied a big
heart.

I judged that this man could be trusted, for
his close looks and his calm seemed to reflect deep thoughts, and that
the homogeneity of expressions in the gestures of the body and face, following
an observation of his physiognomy, resulted an inscrutable frankness.

I felt myself involuntarily reassured in his
presence, and this augured well for our interview.

This person had thirty-five or fifty years,
I was unable to judge more closely. He was tall, with a wide forehead,
a straight nose, a clearly drawn mouth, magnificent teeth, fine hands,
a lengthy and eminent body...all of which seemed worthy worthy to serve
such a high and fascinated soul. This man formed certainly the most admirable
type that I had ever met.

Clearly, Verne engaged in a bit of retconning
in changing Nemo into an Indian. (He originally wanted to make Nemo Polish
but was talked out of it by his publisher.) Which is certainly his right,
as the author, but it does leave those of us with a penchant for continuity
in a bit of a bind. But in the world of League Nemo is clearly an
Indian, and that's that.

Ivan Kristofferson points out that "There is an
old superstition among seafarers that it brings bad luck to have women
aboard. Maybe this is what Nemo's reluctance to `have women on his ship'
is referring to."

Panel 4. "Mohammedan" is an old word for Muslim; it was, though,
in vogue during the Victorian era. Moreover, as an Indian, Sikh, and Hindu,
it is quite logical that he would be contemptuous of Muslims; the Sikhs
and the Muslims have rarely gotten along well, and more often been at each
other's throats.

[1] The "isn't he" is presumably the pursuing man (policeman?)
recognizing either Quatermain or Nemo.

Panel 6. Man: "You will tell us..."

Page 13. Panel 5. As Jason Fliegel points
out, "Nemo" is Latin for "no one." "Nemo" isn't the real name of the Captain
of the Nautilus, in Verne's novel; when asked his identity, he says,

I am nothing to you but Captain Nemo; and you and your companions are
nothing to me but the passengers of the Nautilus.

This is, in all likelihood, a reference by Verne to Odysseus' ploy to the
Cyclops Polyphemus, where he said his name was "No Man."

Page 14. Panel 3.
Kelly Tindall asks, "When we first see Allan in the Nautilus, he is topless
and clearly has three ragged scars on his belly. Attacked by a tiger
or lion? Which "Allan Quatermain" story is that from?" Paul Andinach responds
to this question: "In King Solomon's Mines (and again in Allan
Quatermain, I think), Allan mentions an encounter with a lion, earlier
in his career, that left him with a recurring pain in one leg. The scars
may be from the same attack."

Page 15. Panel 1. The "diamond mines" Quatermain
raves about are King Solomon's, which Quatermain found after many a fierce
adventures. "Umslopogaas" was Quatermain's brave and noble Zulu companion.
His fate is revealed in "Allan and the Sundered Veil," at the back of this
issue. Taina Evans adds, of Umslopogaas' death,
that

it is gone into in more detail in
Rider Haggard's final Allan novel- the eponymously titled Allan Quartermain
(1887, as you note elsewhere). Umslopogaas' death is undoubtedly heroic--and
gone into in far more detail than in the Sundered Veil story--as is Allan's
death.

The steering wheel of the Nautilus, seen behind Nemo and Murray,
is the god Siva, in his dancing form. Siva is the Hindu god of destruction
and of the dance, and one of the three most important of the Hindu religion.
It makes a certain amount of sense that Nemo, who is both warrior and philosopher/scholar,
would worship Siva, who embodies those (and other) characteristics. Plus,
as Moore pointed out in an interview, making the steering wheel of the
Nautilus
into a statue of the dancing Siva is good design sense; this is another
deviation from the description of the Nautilus in the Verne novels,
but one within the bounds of artistic license.

Panel 2. We get another hint about the nature of this alternate
Earth: Nemo, Quatermain, and the others were written about, and their adventures
popularly consumed, just as certain gunfighters in the American Old West
read about their exploits in the pulp press. Bill Jennings notes that this
happened to Sherlock Holmes, also, as seen in "The Valley of Fear."

Panel 4. As Bill Jennings points out, still another indicator
of the true identity of "Mina Murray" is seen here; Bill notes that "while
sidestepping the issue of her ‘qualifications' to be involved with men
as dangerous as Nemo & Quatermain, Murray is unconsciously holding
her scarf, even pointing to her neck." Dr. Eric Fennessey notes that Mina's
scarf is red, a perhaps-deliberate hearkening to Walter Sickert's red scarf
in Moore's From Hell.

Page 16. Panel 1. A few people, MogenDave
among them, have pointed out that the Parisian cityscape seen here seems
to indicate that this really is a Steampunk story, what with the balloons,
smoggy sky, and the strange vehicle in the lower right. Pedro Valente notes
what I should have gotten immediately: that this is a reference to Jules
Verne's Paris in the Twentieth Century.

Panel 3. The "‘Mysterious Island' affair" is a reference to the
book of the same name, the kinda-sequel to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under
The Sea.

Page 17. Panel 1. Auguste Dupin was the
creation of Edgar Allen Poe; he was the brilliant French amateur detective,
and appeared in "Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Mystery of Marie Roget,"
and "The Purloined Letter." Poe, in the character of Dupin, is credited
with establishing, to the greatest degree, the genre of detective fiction.
Like Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Poe's Dupin was based on a real character,
but the elements which make the stories part of the detective genre were
Poe's alone. Terence Chua adds that the source for Dupin was Francois Eugene
Vidocq, an ex-criminal who rose from being an informer for the police to
the head of the Sureté (the Parisian police force). More on Vidocq
can be found here.

Duncan questions how Dupin could still be alive, given the time between
"Murders in the Rue Morgue" and the current story. "Rue Morgue" was published
in 1841, and if Dupin had been 30 in the story, he'd be in his late 80s
in League: old, but certainly not out of the realm of the possible.

As a few people pointed out, including Warren Ellis (!) and Pete Meilinger,
an early Sherlock Holmes story referred to Dupin, with Conan Doyle, via
Holmes, being contemptuous of how Poe wrote Dupin. In "A Study In Scarlet,"
Watson, in response to a typically Holmesian explanation, says:

"It is simple enough as you explain it," I said, smiling. "You remind
me of Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin. I had no idea that such individuals did
exist outside of stories."

Sherlock Holmes rose and lit his pipe. "No doubt you think that you
are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin," he observed. "Now, in my
opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking
in on his friends' thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an
hour's silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical
genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared
to imagine."

Terence Chua adds that

Doyle, of course, is being tongue-in-cheek here, and it is well known
that he did not share Holmes' opinion about Poe or Dupin. In fact, Holmes
himself pulls that "breaking in on his friends' thoughts with an apropos
remark" stunt more than once during the course of his and Watson's association
with each other.

Page 18. Panels 1-2. Dupin is recounting the
events of "Murders in the Rue Morgue."

Panel 4. The "Whitechapel fiend" is Jack the Ripper, who preyed
on the poor women of the Whitechapel district of London.

Panel 5. The Anna/Nana Coupeau referred to here is Emile Zola's
character from L'Assommoir and Nana; she is a woman who is
driven to prostitution by the alcoholism of her parents.

Panel 6. A "demi-mondaine" is a prostitute, more specifically
kept women or women putting themselves forward for same.

Page 19. Panel 3. My guess is that Murray's
reluctance to remove her scarf is due to the lasting scar left on her throat
by the bite of Dracula.

Pages 21-22. My French is not good, but I'll try
to translate...

Page 21. Panel 8. Dupin: "Excuse me, ma'am."

Panel 9. Streetwalker: "Good evening, Daddy. You again?"

Dupin: "I'm looking for a woman. A small brunette. She was with a client..."

Page 22. Panel 1. Streetwalker: "Yeah, I
saw her steal my client! She went in that direction with Henry The Englishman
less than two minutes ago!"

Dupin: "This Henry is a strapping man, yes? A true gorilla?"

Panel 2. Streetwalker: "Henry? He's a small Englishman. He has
a place on the corner."

Dupin: "Thank you, ma'am, you were very helpful."

Panel 5. Ivan Kristofferson notes that
what is being thrown out of the window is an umbrella holder made out of
an elephant's foot.

Page 24. The monstrous "Edward" is Edward Hyde,
of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
In the novel the good Dr. Jekyll uses drugs to separate his "libertine
side" - his id - from his normal self. This leads to the emergence of Jekyll's
evil side, Edward Hyde, who indulges himself in various unspecified depravities.

In the book, however, Hyde was younger than Jekyll, as well as being
stunted and nimble; as Peter David pointed out, via the Marvel supervillain
Mr. Hyde, the story can be seen as an allegory of evolution, with Hyde
being monkey-like, and therefore a step down the moral and evolutionary
ladder from Jekyll. Hyde was not the monstrously huge figure seen here.
As well, at the end of the novel Hyde commits suicide rather than face
the gallows (thanks to R. Winninger for correcting my mistake here). No
doubt these will be explained away as Quatermain's and Nemo's "deaths"
were.

Steven Costa notes that the heavy cane Hyde is
carrying here is the same kind that he used to kill Sir Danvers Carew in
The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde:

He had in his hand a heavy cane, with
which he was trifling; but he answered never a word, and seemed to listen
with an ill-contained impatience. And then all of a sudden he broke out
in a great flame of anger, stamping with his foot, brandishing the cane,
and carrying on (as the maid described it) like a madman. The old gentleman
took a step back, with the air of one very much surprised and a trifle
hurt; and at that Mr Hyde broke out of all bounds, and clubbed him to the
earth. And next moment, with ape-like fury, he was trampling his victim
under foot, and hailing down a storm of blows, under which the bones were
audibly shattered and the body jumped upon the roadway...

It was two o'clock when she came to herself and
called for the police. The murderer was gone long ago; but there lay his
victim in the middle of the lane, incredibly mangled. The stick with which
the deed had been done, although it was of some rare and very tough and
heavy wood, had broken in the middle under the stress of this insensate
cruelty; and one splintered half had rolled in the neighbouring gutter
- the other, without doubt, had been carriedd away by the murderer.

J. Keith Haney adds, about Hyde:

I have some hypotheses regarding the
character of Henry Jekyll/Edward Hyde that came from my recent viewing
of Rouben Mamoulian's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" starring Fredric March.
For starters, let us take the cane Hyde wields as he charges into the room
in the very last page of the main story. The cane is practically identical
to the one used by March's version of Jekyll/Hyde in the film (indeed,
it becomes the murder weapon you mentioned in your annotation as well as
the vital clue to the killer's identity). Secondly, the evolution of Hyde's
physionomy can also be traced back to the film's treatment on the subject.
With each onscreen transformation, Hyde becomes more monstrous, more simian
than the previous one. Eventually, as in this series, any sort of stress
will trigger the transformation, drug or no drug. It therefore is not that
great a leap for Hyde to eventually become the huge Hulk-like creature
he is by 1898.

Note the "Edison/Teslaton" insignia on the wirebox. This provides a clue,
I think, as to the source of the advanced science of League's England.
Thomas Edison, of course, was the brilliant inventor and self-promoter
who, with his associates, developed and created, in 1879, carbonized cotton
thread as a filament for conducting electricity; this eventually led to
the development of the electronic vacuum tube, and was directly responsible
for electric lamps and lighting.

Edison's electronic inventions were powered by direct current - that
is, an electric current flowing in one direction only and being constant
in value/power. Nicola Tesla (1856-1943) was an electrical engineer who
worked for Edison and later became his rival; Tesla invented, in 1888,
the alternating current induction motor, which made possible the universal
transmission and distribution of electricity. Alternating current is electric
current which reverses its direction at regularly recurring intervals;
Tesla's alternating current generators are the basis for the modern electrical
power industry.

In real life Tesla had a difficult time persuading people to make use
of alternating current, for Edison was much more popular and well-known
at the time, and Edison felt that alternating current was dangerous to
human beings. In the world of League, however, a way was seemingly
found to combine the two.

"Allan and the Sundered Veil." I didn't know the
literary source of "Lady Ragnall," but Jerry Boyajian did, and this is
what he said:

She's ex Haggard, and first appears in the Quatermain novel The
Ivory Child [1916], which I haven't read, but is undoubtedly the source
of the "Ivory Boy" reference in "Allan and the Sundered Veil". Her maiden
name is Luna Holmes, which makes me wonder if Moore intends to draw a connection
between her and Mycroft/Sherlock. This novel might also include the first
use of the taduki leaves, which were featured in at least two others of
the Quatermain novels (both with Lady Ragnall):
The Ancient Allan
[1920] and Allan and the Ice Gods [1927].

Lady Ragnall dies in Allan and the Ice Gods and bequeaths Allan
her supply of the taduki leaves. The fumes from the leaves allowed Allan
and Lady Ragnall to experience past lives. I suspect that Quatermain's
addiction to opium in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is the result
of his supply of the leaves being exhausted and his inability to get more.
Lady Ragnall says in "...Sundered Veil" that the two of them are addicted
to the leaves (though it might have been hyperbole). The opium might've
been Quatermain's way of dealing with taduki withdrawal.

The only problem here is that Allan and the Ice Gods takes place
prior to Allan Quatermain (in which Allan supposedly dies), but
the reference to the latter book in "...Sundered Veil" clearly places this
story long after the book. So how can Lady Ragnall still be alive? Given
that (a) Allan's death was faked, and (b) there are a couple of instances
in the novels where Lady Ragnall is believed dead but actually wasn't,
I'd suggest that her death was as fake as his.

P. Graves followed this up with:

Re 'Sundered Veil', you say 'I'd suggest
that her death was as fake as his.' (Lady ragnell). The text actually says
'Her ladyship was not without some personal experience in feigning death',
and that she 'staged her own end some years earlier'. Just thought I'd
let you know that you are therefore correct.

The ads: they are, as far as I can tell, all legitimate,
which is to say, they're real reproductions of Victorian advertising, with
four exceptions, which Bill Jennings also noted:

Page 29: the advertisement for issue #2 of The
League.

Page 30: the ad for "Rosa Coote's Correctional
Academy for Wayward Gentlewomen." This is a reference to the anonymously-authored
Victorian-era work of erotica, The Yellow Room, which starred the
lusty heiress "Rosa Coote." Rosa Coote also appeared in a series called
"Miss Coote's Confession," which appeared in the magazine
The Pearl
in the 1880s. (SRowe noted this, too)

Page 31: the ad for the first issue of Tom Strong,
also written by Alan Moore.

Page 32: the ad for the consulting services of
"S. Blake." This is a reference to Sexton Blake, who will make an appearance
in future issues. Sexton Blake, created by Harry Blyth, first appeared
in The Halfpenny Marvel #6, in December 1893; he was a consulting
detective who lived on Baker Street, in London, and solved crimes with
the help of Tinker, his young assistant. Moore has said that Blake, seeing
that Sherlock Holmes is dead (according to Moore, in 1898 Holmes has already
battled Moriarty for the final time and is thought dead by the public),
has moved into Holmes' lodgings and is taking over for Holmes. It
should be noted that Blake did not begin as a Holmes copy; if I might be
so immodest to quote myself,

...when Blake began he had none of the
characteristics of Holmes. He wore a bowler, not a deerstalker, was muscular
rather than tall and lean, and used a heavy walking stick. He lived not
on Baker Street but in New Inn Chambers, with his offices on Wych Street,
off the Strand. And he was not a lone investigator, but was rather paired
with Jules Gervaise, a French detective. (To quote one critic, "in those
days it was a privilege to be linked with a French detective, so well had
Messrs. Gaboriau and Leroux done their work.") It wasn't until a few years
later, at some point in the late 1890s, that Blake (apparently in need
of some build-up) moved into Baker Street, acquired a Mrs. Hudson-style
housekeeper, and began taking on Holmes-like characteristics.

Much more information on Sexton Blake can be found
at my Sexton Blake
page.

More than a few people, including Bill Jennings, Terence Chua, and lordjulius,
pointed out that Moore's dates are off here; Holmes' "death," in "The Final
Problem," takes place in 1891, with his return, in "The Adventure of the
Empty House," clearly taking place in 1894. The easiest response to this
(besides Moore's simply playing with dates to suit his convenience) is
that Watson deliberately fudged the dates in his stories, although that
response brings with it problems of its own.

Back cover: We see here the five people who will
be making up the League. Moving from the cuff-linked hand, they are: Allan
Quatermain, Captain Nemo, Mina Murray, The Invisible Man, and Mr. Hyde.

The Invisible Man, aka Dr. Griffin, was created by H.G. Wells in his
1897 novel The Invisible Man.

karfan usefully points out that there is a theme with the individuals
who make up the league:

the invisible man, captain nemo, and edward hyde are all traditionally
villains and practically monsters to the victorian way of life. quatermain
with his opium addiction would also be looked upon as somewhat monstrous.
a headstrong and ‘soiled' woman is also a monster for the time,

and that this theme is further supported by Campion Bond's quote.

James Goldin sees a resemblance between this joining
of hands and a similar scene in the origin of the Fantastic Four.

Regarding the quote, Robert W. Sharp notes that, although there never
was a publisher named "Meeson's," H. Rider Haggard did write a book called
Mr.
Meeson's Will, which contains a lot of satire about the publishing
industry.